The trip in was easy--Columbus traffic didn't get us down.

Morning session was awesome. Keynote was great, Max Spevack of Red Hat/Fedora gave an talk on community and freedom.

Afterwards, the chief evangelist of Neuros demonstrated the Neuros OSD. Then, two GNOME guys gave an overview of new features in Gnome 2.20. George and Ken did a fine, find job. The silly convention center needs to offer free Internet access, though—the guys couldn't show of Gnome's new on-line syncing abilities.

Lunch was fantastic. I had Orange Rolls, Miso soup, and Pocky! The other folks got more substantial Asian food, like Chicken Lo Mein and Curry Chicken.

Dave's presentation went very, very well. He really got peoples' attention with his parody of Steve Ballmer's "developers, developers, developers" tirade. Dave did with with "users, users, users" instead, as his the focus of his talk was usability. He agreed that he needs to retool the presentation with more Linux examples, as most of his examples are from Windows or Mac OS X.

I then attended a discussion about F/OSS and how developers can make money from it. Interestingly, the speaker pointed out that while the GPL does specifically declare that the source must be available, it neither specifically allows nor specifically prevents developers from asking for payment for the source. Shh, don't tell Cisco that, nor any of other embedded device companies. I, however, disagree with this, though. I think she was talking GPL3, though.

Then came my favorite presenter: maddog. Jon "maddog" Hall is one of the most prolific programmers and Linux evangelists alive today. I got my picture taken with him last year, and this year, I took a picture of Zack, Jonathan, and Pat with him.

The last regular talk I attended was a talk on packaging for Debian and Ubuntu. The presenter essentially presented a HOWTO he wrote. It was very, very informational and made me with I had something worth packaging.

Although we didn't stay for the afternoon keynote with Bradley Kuhn because we were famished, we did stay to hear Drew Curtis of FARK fame talk about trends in media. He told his favorite FARK clichés and explained some of the weirder stories that have been on the non-news site.